Monday, April 27, 2015

The proponents of what is called rape culture assert that
over 20% of college women have been raped. The statistics are subject to serious
doubt. Scholars like Christina Hoff Summers have questioned the statistics,
noting that women are safer on college campuses than they are in the society at
large.

The notion that white male fraternity brothers are conspiring
to abuse, humiliate and rape college women does not hold up to scrutiny.
Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s story of a gang rape at a fraternity at the University
of Virginia was a lie.

And yet, those who want believe that privileged white males
are a crime wave embraced the story uncritically.

Even though the statistics have been distorted and the
evidence for “rape culture” is questionable, this does not mean that American college
campuses do not have a sex problem. In fact, they have a very serious sex
problem. It might not be the one that the rape culture activists see, but it is
there.

But it
is not credible that before the piece, the administration was unaware of the
sexual chaos in student life. For nearly a decade, Bill Wilson was dean of the
Echols Scholars Program at the university. He and others in similar positions
reported to the administration what they had heard. Dozens of bright young
college women told Wilson that they had been sexually humiliated, assaulted, or
raped.

They offer further evidence:

A
recent female graduate of the University of Virginia wrote the following for a
class assignment:

Sex pervades almost every aspect of dorm life
that I have experienced. I have seen “dorm incest” (the entire floor hooks up
with everyone else on the floor), [been] “sexiled,” by my roommate having sex
on my dorm bed, and witnessed date rape . . .

They quote another woman’s description of life in a coed
dorm:

Most of the people in your dorm were in the
“friend zone.” Everyone was a “guy.” But even with sweatpants on we recognized
we had different body parts and late at night with a couple of beers things got
more intimate. We were not so much male and female as we were xx who logically
should give xy what they want and what we have. We were all one mutually using
and abusing non-family.

Sexual license was actively encouraged and
funded by the university. From “Spring-break fun packs” full of condoms and
forms of contraception handed out at the student center with a cute note from a
pudgy sunshine face wearing shades saying “Have a Fun Spring Break!” to “Sexual
Arts and Crafts” flyers plastered on the dorm halls—the message is clear:
college is a parent-funded motel party of casual and impersonal, but, yes,
“safe sex.”

The problem did not begin yesterday. It began with the
sexual revolution of the Vietnam Era and the advent of second-wave feminism.

The professors explain:

Fifty
years ago, when the great campaign against single-sex education commenced under
the banner of the sexual revolution, it was promised that by bringing the sexes
into closer proximity, a healthier environment for relations between young men
and women would form. It is possible that this might have happened had our
schools not taken down the conventions and institutional arrangements that for
generations had brought the sexes together in a more or less orderly and
purposeful way.

Back
then, we were told that the old order must be abolished because the standards
and conventions it embodied favored men. Young women would be sexually liberated
and the “playing field” leveled. Therefore, parietal hours were eliminated and
mixed-sex dorms, once inconceivable, became the norm. In the process, the new
unisex coeducational colleges and universities that are so familiar to us today
came into existence. These institutions committed themselves to dismantling the
culture of courtship that until then colleges had accepted and in a variety of
ways fostered within an educational environment.

The
idea was even bandied about that in a coeducational setting, women would be
better able to “domesticate” the men. That goal was soon forgotten, once
marriage no longer figured as a social value and was replaced by the monolithic
aim of success in a career.

Think about it for a moment. Do women living in coed dorms
feel that their space is being violated? Do they feel that they feel that their
modesty and intimacy are being invaded?

Apparently, the new arrangement allows young men to believe
that they can take advantage of young women. When colleges do not put any real
barriers between men and women they encourage this misapprehension. When they do not provide institutional protections for women they are suggesting that women do not need protection, or even that those who abuse women will not suffer any consequences.

And yet, if a woman feels violated and invaded by the
presence of males in her dorm, it would not count as rape within the criminal
justice system. Surely, it is a problem, but it is not going to be solved by guilt-tripping
young men and policing their behavior more vigorously.

Guroian and Wilson explain that the new living arrangements
militate against the old customs of dating and courtship:

Our
unisex colleges and universities have abolished those spaces. What remains,
what they have gone about creating, are spaces that invite and accommodate
hook-ups and casual cohabitation—and open opportunities for forms of sexual
violence that were not likely to happen on campus grounds in the past.

The sexual revolution and feminism conspired to kill off
courtship and dating. If women were going to put career ahead of marriage, they
would be liberated to seek out sexual pleasure for the sake of sexual pleasure.
That is, they would have sex like men. They would do their best not to get
involved in the kinds of relationships with men that would draw them away from
the career track.

Many young women have chosen to act accordingly. Thus they actively
created the hookup culture.

How many women are really hooking up? Surely, fewer than the
mania about it would suggest.

And yet, the question is not so much statistics as
reputation. Once a significant number of young women choose voluntarily to
engage in sexual acts with men they do not know and do not even care to know—the
better to have sex like a man—word gets around.

If it were just an occasional woman here and there, it would
be one thing. But when a significant number of women hook up, anyone who
belongs to the group gains a certain reputation.

It may feel perfectly old-fashioned, like something a mother
would say, but reputation does matter. Once a woman or a group of women gain a
reputation for giving away their sexual favors promiscuously, men begin to
treat them accordingly.

Worse yet, many women who engaged in hookups did not really
want to do so. They had to get themselves severely drunk or stoned in order to
do it.

Did they feel that they were then really consenting? Did they
then feel that boys should have known that, in their inebriated state, their
word should not be respected?

In some ways, as I have long suggested, the rape culture is
an effort to put an end to the hookup culture and to restore some sense of
honor to young women who abandoned theirs too quickly and now regret it.

You may think that the now well-known walk of shame was a
sign of a failure to accept women’s new liberated sexuality, but, in truth, young
women who had hooked up or who had too much sexual experience too soon must
have discovered that it did not make them feel very good about themselves.

Some of them required medication. Few of them got to the
point where they admitted that they had been duped by the sexual
revolutionaries and used by the second generation feminists.

Following the prescribed narrative, they blamed it on white
male fraternity brothers.

Women might imagine that they are now free to write their
own narratives, but they have been captured by the feminist narrative. In it
men are to blame and women (to say nothing of feminists) are blameless.

Telling themselves on the one hand that no one has a right
to judge them and seeing on the other that many men are treating them in a
certain way... they are at a loss.

The moral code of courtship behavior had evolved over
centuries. Feminists decided that it demeaned and diminished women. Some even
thought that it was a conspiracy designed to keep women out of the workplace.

Were you to suggest that the code of gentlemanly and
ladylike behavior was designed to protect and safeguard feminine modesty and
intimacy you would have been dismissed as patriarchal swine. Feminists insisted that
these codes, coupled with parietal restrictions, assumed that women were weak
and needing protection. The only protection a woman really needed was a condom,
don’t you understand?

The authors explain:

… before
the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies, the “yes” and “no,” ­now­adays
promoted as the be-all and end-all of sexual etiquette, were given moral force
by a restraining and clarifying ensemble of conventions and threshold spaces
that the colleges and universities saw fit to sweep away virtually overnight.

Having attended the university at a time before courtship
and dating were undermined, Guroian and Wilson recall the reality of the
ancient regime:

The
truth is that never did we feel the ideal of being a Virginia gentleman
licensed us to treat young women as inferiors with whom we could do whatever we
pleased. Just the opposite. The ideal of a gentleman had the moral power to put
the brakes on our most tawdry and aggressive male proclivities and to make us
take pride in our manhood. Some of us took seriously one line of a poem titled
“The Honor Men,” which we hung in our rooms. It said “pursue no woman to her
tears.”

They continue to point out that these codes of behavior were
designed to protect women from sexual violence:

Back
then, everything possible was in place to prevent a rape or any other form of
sexual violence from being committed in a fraternity house or university
housing. Women were not permitted in dormitory rooms or fraternity bedrooms.
Those notorious University of Virginia gentlemen at the “Playboy School of the
South” enforced their own parietal rules, and housemothers could be found at
fraternity parties until 1968. Young women who visited for an overnight stay
were assigned to “approved housing” that their institutions selected, rooms
more often than not in the homes of widows who had space to let. If a young
woman was uncomfortable with her date, a refuge was available, and there was a
curfew. “No” had the force of strong conventions and in loco parentis. There wasn’t the need for draconian rules and
punishments, because the university and women’s colleges represented real
standards that were reflected in the arrangements they had put in place to
bring the sexes together in an orderly fashion.

Unfortunately, universities are incapable of accepting that
their grand social experiment did not work out as expected:

Our
colleges and universities have not fessed up to the sexual anarchy and formless
sex that they helped bring into existence when they sponsored and
institutionalized the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies. Even as
the evidence has mounted to undeniable proportions that something has gone
horribly wrong with relations between the sexes on our campuses, colleges will
not admit culpability for the ugly scene. Most important, they will not admit
that the great experiment of institutionalizing the sexual revolution has
failed at the cost of many, many ruined lives.

Finally, in the anarchy created by the absence of customs
that determine courtship, schools have imposed their own guilt
narrative. They have replaced a shame culture with a guilt culture… not knowing
that the latter is far less efficient and effective at regulating human
behavior.

The authors write:

Consequently,
when an act of sexual misconduct, violent or otherwise, is alleged, an
avoidance of moral standards under the pretense of extending freedom to young
adults quickly and perversely turns to finding guilt in any party conveniently
at hand….

The
same persons who in their youth supported the liberation of the sexes from
so-called Victorian inhibitions and morals are now rushing to impose at
colleges complex codes of sexual conduct that would have been unimaginable a
generation ago. These codes reveal well the dilemma they face. When equality of
the sexes became the epicenter of the sexual revolution, activists removed all
of the conventions and arrangements that shielded females from aggressive male
behavior. They had to do so, or else they would have appeared still to respect
differences between men and women. But now, faced with rising numbers of
damaged students, they must produce rules of sexual engagement that will stop
the abuses and traumas. The dilemma is this: How do you acknowledge the special
vulnerability of women to men while disallowing distinct codes of conduct for
men and women? The current solution is to adopt a formal and abstract language
that ­maintains the unisex ideal and keeps silent about male–female ­differences.

On the one hand women insist that they are in every way
equal to men. On the other hand women insist that they are especially
vulnerable to men and in need of the kind of special protection that only the
state can provide:

In
January of this year, the National Panhellenic Conference, an association of
national sororities, instructed sorority women at the University of Virginia
for their own safety not to attend the annual Boys Bid Night fraternity
parties. This prompted an immediate counterreaction that has not yet played out
entirely. Female students protested that this directive contradicted the gains
women have made to stand on equal ground with men in social and sexual matters.

6 comments:

"Sexual license was actively encouraged and funded by the university. From “Spring-break fun packs” full of condoms and forms of contraception handed out at the student center with a cute note from a pudgy sunshine face wearing shades saying “Have a Fun Spring Break!” to “Sexual Arts and Crafts” flyers plastered on the dorm halls—the message is clear: college is a parent-funded motel party of casual and impersonal, but, yes, “safe sex.” " The first part of the problem: Colleges and universities encourage and enable sexual relations.

" The sexual revolution and feminism conspired to kill off courtship and dating. If women were going to put career ahead of marriage, they would be liberated to seek out sexual pleasure for the sake of sexual pleasure. That is, they would have sex like men. They would do their best not to get involved in the kinds of relationships with men that would draw them away from the career track.

Many young women have chosen to act accordingly. Thus they actively created the hookup culture." The second part.

"Worse yet, many women who engaged in hookups did not really want to do so. They had to get themselves severely drunk or stoned in order to do it." Part the third, which is exacerbated by colleges which consider a drunken woman incapable of responsibility and a drunken man "totally at fault; TOTALLY". Part 3.5, advising women to not get drunk, be careful, be responsible for yourselves...WELL! THAT'S ENABLING/EXCUSING RAPE CULTURE.

"Were you to suggest that the code of gentlemanly and ladylike behavior was designed to protect and safeguard feminine modesty and intimacy you would have been dismissed as patriarchal swine. Feminists insisted that these codes, coupled with parietal restrictions, assumed that women were weak and needing protection. The only protection a woman really needed was a condom, don’t you understand?" Part 3.6: Women are totally capable in all respects, but must be protected from men and any little thing that might upset them, like "microagressions".

"Our colleges and universities have not fessed up to the sexual anarchy and formless sex that they helped bring into existence when they sponsored and institutionalized the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies. Even as the evidence has mounted to undeniable proportions that something has gone horribly wrong with relations between the sexes on our campuses, colleges will not admit culpability for the ugly scene. Most important, they will not admit that the great experiment of institutionalizing the sexual revolution has failed at the cost of many, many ruined lives." The Left never accepts blame for anything they do that fails.

"On the one hand women insist that they are in every way equal to men. On the other hand women insist that they are especially vulnerable to men and in need of the kind of special protection that only the state can provide:" My Part 3.6 and the previous para.

"[M]any women who engaged in hookups did not really want to do so. They had to get themselves severely drunk or stoned in order to do it."

No, they know what they're doing. They want to have fun and have sex with attractive men. As a bonus, getting hammered provides them with excellent cover to rationalize anything that happens. A girl can point to the alcohol should she later decide that the man wasn't up to her standards or if she feels any regret about adding another man to her sexual-partner number.

re: The problem did not begin yesterday. It began with the sexual revolution of the Vietnam Era and the advent of second-wave feminism.

It wasn't just "second-wave feminism" but contraceptives, birth control pill and condoms, than enabled this revolution, that enabled women to be as "slutty as men" or something like that.

But of course fear of pregnancy didn't limit the potential for sexual assault, no need for rape.

Co-ed housing is surprising to me, and I've never talked to anyone who has experienced this. I can imagine it as an experiment, but I can't imagine it as wise.

But going back to yesterday's blog, "misunderstandings", I also remind myself that individual men and individual women are all very different, and it's not clear that shame or guilt are monolithic things that affect all in the same way.

One woman I dated in my 20s said she had sex for the first time when she was 14, and the guy was much older, and she initiated it because she was curious. It was at a house party for another school. So that's statutory rape, yet she said she felt completely safe, and in control of the situation.

But if she had a different temperament, someone who was religious and believed fornication was sinful, and divided her consciousness between the "good girl" who is innocent, and the "bad girl" who gets manipulated by men, then that first sexual experience would be very different, and she'd try to keep herself divided, having a public show of the good girl, and would become mortified if anyone learned of the truth of her bad side she kept hidden.

But "what if" we were still a prudish culture, and the Catholic virtues had won, and contractives were immoral, and "one slip" meant losing your reputation and any hope of a good life where you could walk free and not worry about that snickering behind your back is talking about you.

I imagine that might keep 60% of women on the virtuous path, protected from their own immaturity, but 40% would rebel regardless, and would create an underground network of contraceptives, and abortion options, and parents and teachers could be proud that all their students "look" virtuous, except for the times truth comes out.

So I can see peer pressure is a tough things, and we can "protect" 60% of young women from imprudent sexual explorations when they'd really prefer to set limits, but are afraid of being different. I still have to believe only a small fraction of women participate in "hookup" culture.

And I can see the good thing about "breaking the rules" is you have to know you are "100% responsible" for the consequences (minus the disassociation splitting problem), while if sexual activity is condoned and encouraged, then weak-willed women can blame society for not protecting them from the risks and consequences.

So whatever the true "rape culture" is about, perhaps many will agree its not a useful metaphor to help protect women.